That's exactly why the most prominent work in brain simulation doesn't bother at all with trying to actually simulate the physical functions of the brain.
They've taken the more sane "functionally equivalent" path by painstakingly duplicating the results of the brain's processes, not the processes themselves.
They do this because we only have a rudimentary understanding of the way the chemicals in the brain interact in order to process data.
This is Kurzweil's fundamental mistake. He thinks the genome is uncompressed data. The fact is, it's extremely compressed, and relies on the physical properties of various chemicals as its decompression algorithm.
That 100 million bytes, which he thinks can be compressed down to 10 million bytes, must actually be decompressed into the billions or trillions of bytes of information it actually contains before you can begin to simulate it.
You might be able to simulate the genome with a million lines of code, but you aren't going to simulate the brain that way.
None of that explains Meyer's description of Kurzweil's fundamental disconnect with what he believes the genome does and what it actually does.
Kurzweil basically stated that you could reverse engineer a Mac from an Intel CPU. There is a hell of a lot going on there than he thinks there is, and it certainly boils down to a hell of a lot more than a million lines of code. That's what you need to start simulating the brain, it's definitely not going to get you all the way there.
The brain is weird. The way I understand the genome-brain relationship, the genome is both the template and the materials list for the brain, and the brain is both the processor and the program.
The basics of how the brain handles data are determined by the genome when it is built, but the vast majority of the way the brain works is modified during development.
Kurzweil is effectively saying you can reverse-engineer a Mac from the schematic and parts list for a an Intel CPU.
That's the fundamental misunderstanding TFA talks about, and it's a big one.
+5 Troll is godlike. Do you realize what you need to do to get such a moderation? The a significant majority of the people must mod you up, yet the highest number of a single mod (with the exception of "Underrated") must be the Troll mod.
Frankly I think Flash is going to be around a long, long time.
It may drop from its pedestal in 3-4 years, but you'll still need a flash plugin for probably at least the next decade if you want to have full web compatibility.
The other thing flash has in its favor is it is able to adapt to emerging technologies.
I mean, look how long HTML5 took (is still taking, really). What if a new multimedia technology comes out that everybody simply must have? Adobe will be able to meet that need without creating any standards compliance issues. People betting the farm on HTML5 will be shit out of luck.
This is really why Flash has been successful - it started out as simply nothing more than a light weight animation delivery system, and over the years it has expanded with the market. The HTML standards body has shown they are completely incapable of that, so while HTML5 might make a dent in Flash for the next few years, it won't be long until Flash offers something that makes it indispensable again. They've done it time and time again, it doesn't make sense to think they'll be stopping any time soon.
You're ignoring something that is very, very big and very, very important:
There are a lot of web developers who have mastered Flash. A great many of these will not be learning a new framework unless there are some serious advantages, simply because they already know how to use Flash. As long as Flash is "good enough" developers will continue to use it.
Look at VB6. That came out 12 years ago, was replaced by VB.Net 10 years ago, and it's far from dead. There are a whole lot of applications that are being maintained in VB6, and even some apps that continue to be created because that is what the developers prefer. Not many of those, but they still exist.
Look at VB5 - almost nobody uses it, not even close to the number of folks who use VB6. So why didn't the people who upgraded from VB5 to VB6 upgrade to VB.Net? Because VB6 and VB.Net are different languages, VB5 and VB6 are simply different versions of the same.
I really think you're severely underestimating people's resistance to change. Nobody is going to want to throw away 10 years of experience coding Flash to learn something else. Many will do it anyway, but not many of them will be happy about it. Nobody is going to want to throw away a well designed and functional flash website just to build it out of HTML5. The idea of it is simply naive. That means a great many of them will continue to develop in Flash, in spite of whatever the new hotness is. As long as Adobe keeps putting out a competing product, it will be hard to displace them. Most of the people who take up HTML 5 or Google Native Client or whatever will be new developers, not established developers. It's going to take a very long time for any of this stuff to make a major dent in Adobe's dominance.
The article says HTML 5 does not take care of the other multitude of things Flash is used for, and the person who was quoted (who's background you just took out of context) was making the point that Flash is used for a lot more than video, so just replacing video does not remove the need for Flash.
Where's the contradiction?
What point are you trying to make? That HTML5 video works on any browser (or device) that can handle HTML5? No shit shirlock, that's like saying white cows have no black as long as they are white. Way to go captain obvious.
It became pretty clear he was just ranting right away though.
The article is supposed to be about how the SF government is just as guilty as Childs is, but they don't give a single shred of evidence to support that. All they offer is a confused analogy about laundry, basketball, and drilling at the beginning. And really, how could the city be guilty of a denial of service attack against itself? The idea is silly, at best. The rest is basically about how the sentence was unfair because other court cases where defendants were convicted of / pleaded guilty to completely different crimes received lighter punishments.
The case in the article was actually one year, but the guy was never convicted of murder. It was plea bargained down to manslaughter, and with only a one year sentence it is evident that the evidence against the guy was shaky, at best. You don't give a guy you think is a murderer a 1 year manslaughter deal if you have a slam-dunk case. No chance in hell.
If Childs' case had been a weak one, no doubt the prosecution would have let him bargain it down to time served, and likely would have done the bargaining at some point earlier in the process.
Unfortunately for Childs, it was a pretty slam-dunk case, and that's when you tend to get the bigger sentences.
The thing with trademarks, though, is you must defend them, or you lose them.
Therefore, even if Best Buy only thinks this guy might be infringing their trademark, they must defend it. If another case of infringement comes up and they didn't make every effort to defend themselves in this case, it is almost certain that the infringers in the future case will point to Best Buy ignoring a threat to their trademark. If that happens, Best Buy's trademark could be nullified completely.
So even if Best Buy couldn't care less whether or not this guy infringes on their trademark, they must still defend it against him if they want their trademark to have any legal standing in the future.
It wouldn't be too surprising if this guy ends up with a non-profit trademark license of some kind. It may be that all Best Buy is after is the appearance of rigorous defense of their trademark.
Obviously Winter was invented by a secret cabal including the top scientists of Sears, Target, Walmart, Burlington Coat Factory, and Coca-Cola (those santa pics pre-date winter by at least a decade!) in order to sell cold weather clothing.
I can't believe all you sheep have been so blind for so long.
Give me a break. The solar activity cycle has been documented and studied since the early '60's (if not prior).
Furthermore, we can measure the activity a lot better now than we ever could in the past, which allows our understanding of those cycles to grow and expand.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly why the most prominent work in brain simulation doesn't bother at all with trying to actually simulate the physical functions of the brain.
They've taken the more sane "functionally equivalent" path by painstakingly duplicating the results of the brain's processes, not the processes themselves.
They do this because we only have a rudimentary understanding of the way the chemicals in the brain interact in order to process data.
This is Kurzweil's fundamental mistake. He thinks the genome is uncompressed data. The fact is, it's extremely compressed, and relies on the physical properties of various chemicals as its decompression algorithm.
That 100 million bytes, which he thinks can be compressed down to 10 million bytes, must actually be decompressed into the billions or trillions of bytes of information it actually contains before you can begin to simulate it.
You might be able to simulate the genome with a million lines of code, but you aren't going to simulate the brain that way.
None of that explains Meyer's description of Kurzweil's fundamental disconnect with what he believes the genome does and what it actually does.
Kurzweil basically stated that you could reverse engineer a Mac from an Intel CPU. There is a hell of a lot going on there than he thinks there is, and it certainly boils down to a hell of a lot more than a million lines of code. That's what you need to start simulating the brain, it's definitely not going to get you all the way there.
If that is all red is, then explain this.
No, the genome is the program.
No it isn't, it's the schematic for the hardware.
The brain is weird. The way I understand the genome-brain relationship, the genome is both the template and the materials list for the brain, and the brain is both the processor and the program.
The basics of how the brain handles data are determined by the genome when it is built, but the vast majority of the way the brain works is modified during development.
Kurzweil is effectively saying you can reverse-engineer a Mac from the schematic and parts list for a an Intel CPU.
That's the fundamental misunderstanding TFA talks about, and it's a big one.
+1 Troll is pretty damned impressive.
+5 Troll is godlike. Do you realize what you need to do to get such a moderation? The a significant majority of the people must mod you up, yet the highest number of a single mod (with the exception of "Underrated") must be the Troll mod.
The very idea is mind-boggling.
None of the "tools" or "interactivity" matter to consumers.
But it does matter to developers. Hey, guess who puts the video on the web?
Frankly I think Flash is going to be around a long, long time.
It may drop from its pedestal in 3-4 years, but you'll still need a flash plugin for probably at least the next decade if you want to have full web compatibility.
The other thing flash has in its favor is it is able to adapt to emerging technologies.
I mean, look how long HTML5 took (is still taking, really). What if a new multimedia technology comes out that everybody simply must have? Adobe will be able to meet that need without creating any standards compliance issues. People betting the farm on HTML5 will be shit out of luck.
This is really why Flash has been successful - it started out as simply nothing more than a light weight animation delivery system, and over the years it has expanded with the market. The HTML standards body has shown they are completely incapable of that, so while HTML5 might make a dent in Flash for the next few years, it won't be long until Flash offers something that makes it indispensable again. They've done it time and time again, it doesn't make sense to think they'll be stopping any time soon.
I thought most high quality flash video was h.264 anyway - Adobe added support for it a couple years ago.
Converting the video from SWF, a vector format, to WebM or VP8, a compressed pixel format, just makes the file ten times bigger over the wire.
Just cut the quality by a factor of 10, problem solved!
This way, you get far lower quality animation at the same bandwidth. Isn't HTML5 wonderful?
Firefox 4 isn't out yet, dumbass.
IE is the #1 browser on the market, so it's kind of a big deal.
If you can't understand why you obviously have zero understanding of business.
You're ignoring something that is very, very big and very, very important:
There are a lot of web developers who have mastered Flash. A great many of these will not be learning a new framework unless there are some serious advantages, simply because they already know how to use Flash. As long as Flash is "good enough" developers will continue to use it.
Look at VB6. That came out 12 years ago, was replaced by VB.Net 10 years ago, and it's far from dead. There are a whole lot of applications that are being maintained in VB6, and even some apps that continue to be created because that is what the developers prefer. Not many of those, but they still exist.
Look at VB5 - almost nobody uses it, not even close to the number of folks who use VB6. So why didn't the people who upgraded from VB5 to VB6 upgrade to VB.Net? Because VB6 and VB.Net are different languages, VB5 and VB6 are simply different versions of the same.
I really think you're severely underestimating people's resistance to change. Nobody is going to want to throw away 10 years of experience coding Flash to learn something else. Many will do it anyway, but not many of them will be happy about it. Nobody is going to want to throw away a well designed and functional flash website just to build it out of HTML5. The idea of it is simply naive. That means a great many of them will continue to develop in Flash, in spite of whatever the new hotness is. As long as Adobe keeps putting out a competing product, it will be hard to displace them. Most of the people who take up HTML 5 or Google Native Client or whatever will be new developers, not established developers. It's going to take a very long time for any of this stuff to make a major dent in Adobe's dominance.
The article says HTML 5 does not take care of the other multitude of things Flash is used for, and the person who was quoted (who's background you just took out of context) was making the point that Flash is used for a lot more than video, so just replacing video does not remove the need for Flash.
Where's the contradiction?
What point are you trying to make? That HTML5 video works on any browser (or device) that can handle HTML5? No shit shirlock, that's like saying white cows have no black as long as they are white. Way to go captain obvious.
Bingo, but it's kinda lame.
And expensive (much more than a plain jane iPod Touch).
But still, it's the only real option other than the iPod Touch for that type of device.
Wake me up when a game contains the following plot:
Why would I bother waking you up for anything? I don't know you, and I don't care who you are, either. I'm certainly never going to wake you up.
That's, what, 8 times bigger than TFA?
Works for me man!
New York is just now getting these?
Wow, Alaska has had them for a while now.
Or is there something about this that I'm missing?
Heh, you know I totally missed that.
It became pretty clear he was just ranting right away though.
The article is supposed to be about how the SF government is just as guilty as Childs is, but they don't give a single shred of evidence to support that. All they offer is a confused analogy about laundry, basketball, and drilling at the beginning. And really, how could the city be guilty of a denial of service attack against itself? The idea is silly, at best. The rest is basically about how the sentence was unfair because other court cases where defendants were convicted of / pleaded guilty to completely different crimes received lighter punishments.
It's just a jumbled mess of nonsense, really.
I know right? There's no way you'd perform an expensive drilling operation on a basketball court - and while airing out your dirty laundry to boot!
A murderer getting two years in murder is insane.
The case in the article was actually one year, but the guy was never convicted of murder. It was plea bargained down to manslaughter, and with only a one year sentence it is evident that the evidence against the guy was shaky, at best. You don't give a guy you think is a murderer a 1 year manslaughter deal if you have a slam-dunk case. No chance in hell.
If Childs' case had been a weak one, no doubt the prosecution would have let him bargain it down to time served, and likely would have done the bargaining at some point earlier in the process.
Unfortunately for Childs, it was a pretty slam-dunk case, and that's when you tend to get the bigger sentences.
Ah, well, I didn't know he waved it, that hadn't come up in anything I had read about the case.
So what you're really saying is that there was absolutely nothing of value in the article, at all.
The thing with trademarks, though, is you must defend them, or you lose them.
Therefore, even if Best Buy only thinks this guy might be infringing their trademark, they must defend it. If another case of infringement comes up and they didn't make every effort to defend themselves in this case, it is almost certain that the infringers in the future case will point to Best Buy ignoring a threat to their trademark. If that happens, Best Buy's trademark could be nullified completely.
So even if Best Buy couldn't care less whether or not this guy infringes on their trademark, they must still defend it against him if they want their trademark to have any legal standing in the future.
It wouldn't be too surprising if this guy ends up with a non-profit trademark license of some kind. It may be that all Best Buy is after is the appearance of rigorous defense of their trademark.
Do you mean just a "quite period"? Or a quiet period as long as this one?
If it's the former, there will be another minimum in 11 years. If you want the latter you'll probably have to wait another 100 years or so.
Interestingly enough, while this minimum is about as big as one a hundred years ago, the Dalton minimum 200 years ago was significantly longer.
Obviously Winter was invented by a secret cabal including the top scientists of Sears, Target, Walmart, Burlington Coat Factory, and Coca-Cola (those santa pics pre-date winter by at least a decade!) in order to sell cold weather clothing.
I can't believe all you sheep have been so blind for so long.
Give me a break. The solar activity cycle has been documented and studied since the early '60's (if not prior).
Furthermore, we can measure the activity a lot better now than we ever could in the past, which allows our understanding of those cycles to grow and expand.
The GP is incredibly ignorant.